Now Barack Obama Can Brag About His Klout Score With a (Slightly) Straighter Face

Share

Now Barack Obama Can Brag About His Klout Score With a (Slightly) Straighter Face

Photo: Steve Hall/

Flickr

Until now, Klout has been a black box when it comes to figuring out how the company determines your score. You might have an inkling that the week you spent on vacation away from your Twitter account was the reason for the dip in your score, but you can't be certain. Tuesday, Klout launched a major update it claims boosts score accuracy and makes its scoring process more transparent.

Before Klout, we had no idea how much social influence we had over others, and frankly most of us didn't care. Along came this service that algorithmically showed how you hold sway on social networks, how influential you are on certain topics, and somehow gave you an overall score. People's response to the service has been mostly split. There are those that obsess over their scores, trying to dial them up as high as possible, and those that detest the service for its inaccuracy and unclear practices (and probably their low scores).

The company's first major update in more than a year pulls back the curtain on how it determines your score. Klout says it looks at 400 signals from seven social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Before this update, it only factored in 100 signals.

The new set of signals include Facebook Likes, mentions, comments, and wall posts; Twitter @ mentions, retweets, followers, and replies; and LinkedIn job title, connections, and recommendations. Klout also boasts it's pulling in 12 billion pieces of information per day from its users, versus 1 billion before the update.

Beyond social signals, Klout uses its own internal signal, called +K. Fellow Klout users can suggest topics they believe others have influence over, and vote for those topics by clicking a +K button. The feature has received a lot of flack from users because many people abuse it by suggesting and voting for obscure and funny topics directed at their friends. Klout says that it caps the amount +Ks can grow your score, to prevent people from gaming the system.

Klout's other plan to prevent people from undermining the scoring system is to measure real-world influence by adding Wikipedia to the mix. If you happen to be the subject of a Wikipedia page and that page has a high Google PageRank score, your Klout score will go up. If others link to your Wikipedia page, you score will climb higher still. Thanks to Wikipedia, Barack Obama's score went from 94 to 99 because his Wikipedia page is more influential. Justin Bieber's Wikipedia page, on the other hand, isn't as important as the POTUS's, so his score dropped from a perfect 100 to 92.

Klout is also folding into overall scores something it's calling a Moments section, sort of a social resume. Moments are posts that generated action from the people in your social networks. That could be a tweet that received a lot of retweets and replies, or a Facebook post that started a discussion among your friends. The new scores became available Tuesday, but it will take a few weeks before everyone sees Klout's new dashboard with Moments.

Klout has a lot to prove to users and would-be users who feel its scores are arbitrary or plain useless. But if Klout's additional social signals coupled with Moments start to more accurately reflect influence, or at least get in the ballpark, it might be enough to get Klout itself the influence it craves.